When the whole world celebrated Frida Kahlo on her 117th birthday on 6 July, could Kolkata be far behind? At an art gallery bash in the city, the iconic Mexican artist was dressed in a traditional white Bengali saree with a red border, which, in a nod to the Indigenous roots that she so proudly flaunted all her life, she wore in true tribal style. In another avatar, she is seen riding a bright yellow-black tiger in iconography that is unmistakeably Maa Durga-esque.
No, it wasn’t a fancy dress party but a gala where Kahlo was imagined by artists invited to celebrate her in oil, canvas, bronze and clay. Most of them were from Bengal and they embraced the Mexican artist so warmly that, by the end of the day, you could forgive them for calling Frida Kahlo simply Frida Di.
The trailblazing artist inspired hundreds of exhibitions across the world after she died in 1954 at age 47. Her paintings, clothes, jewellery, and even her make-up have been subjects of art displays. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum exhibited her wardrobe in 2018. These were personal effects locked up for 50 years after her death on the instruction of her husband Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist who Frida married for a second time after a brief divorce. In 2021, an immersive Frida show toured the world. Currently, an exhibition of her medical records and the prosthetics she used, which defined her life and art, is on display in Singapore. Also, at The Blue House, her home in Mexico City which is now a museum, and at art capitals across the world, her work and her life are being examined afresh.
Seventy years after her death, Kahlo still fascinates. And Kolkata’s artists are under her spell.
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Hummingbirds, parrots & paint brush
Subir Dey, a Government College of Art & Craft graduate, who works with designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, saw the daily travails of his mother, wife and other women around him in Kahlo’s struggles with disability, her pain and resilience.
“I painted her as a Bengali woman,” Dey said, “who also struggle with so much all their life, like Frida Kahlo.”
Swarna Chitrakar, the 52-year-old creator of the famed patachitra scrolls of Medinipur, found an inspiring lust for life in Kahlo’s story. “Monay legechilo,” she said (her story touched me). “If a bird’s wing is cut off, it doesn’t want to live. But this woman without a leg would lie in bed and paint.”
Chitrakar has painted Frida Kahlo lying on the road after the crash between a tramcar and a bus. The accident led to a metal rod piercing her midsection, leaving her with life-long disabilities from the age of 18. In the long months that she spent recovering in bed, Kahlo used a lap easel to paint self-portraits, which are now iconic. Chitrakar has also painted her version of the bed-ridden artist and Kahlo’s epochal hummingbird impaled on the necklace of thorns, which is so tight around her neck that it makes her bleed.
Layala, another artist from Chitrakar’s village, Pingla, painted Kahlo with her parrots and her monkey, and in some of her patachitras, astride a tiger, almost like Maa Durga. Layala and Chitrakar never went to art school and had never heard of the Mexican legend before Aban Desai of Tejas Art Gallery told them her story and invited them to paint her through their eyes for her birth anniversary.
Bhaskar Chitrakar, the sixth generation of pat artists of Kalighat, did not know of Frida Kahlo either. But today, he is her acolyte. His renditions of Kahlo are bright, and brilliant with no pain or sorrow. Only power. “I can’t imagine how she created her detailed art,” he said, “with a broken spine.”
The Mexican artist had slipped Gopal Naskar’s mind, even though he had studied her work as a student at Kolkata’s Government Art College, the nursery for greats of the Bengal School of Art. But once he began painting her this January for the 6 July show, he just couldn’t stop. The gallery had asked for four to six canvases, but he ended up painting 38. “She is such a layered artist telling us so many stories of her life, her pain, her politics,” Naskar said. “I just couldn’t stop painting her.”
What would Frida Kahlo say if she attended the show?
It is truly impossible to second guess an artist who once said “I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. I am a subject I want to know better.” For any other artist, attempting to know Frida Kahlo better than Frida Kahlo herself is an unenviable challenge. But that’s no reason to stop celebrating an artist who is a modern-day icon for women’s empowerment, gender neutrality, ethnicity, beauty, disability and politics—a trailblazer who defies and transcends all labels.
Happy Birthday, Frida Kahlo. So glad Kolkata remembered.
Monideepa Banerjie is a senior journalist based in Kolkata. She tweets @Monideepa62. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)